Faithless
01-28-2005, 01:37 PM
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v245/chottomatte/thankgod000.jpg
THE BITTER END OF THE LEFT: Scenes from a wartime inauguration. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:97675)
by Tom Gogola - January 27, 2005
Washington, Jan. 20--The bum was sprawled out in front of the EPA building and I was thinking about a line from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, when Dr. Gonzo is watching a skel from his hotel window and trying hard not to identify too much with him. I'd rolled down to Washington the night before on the midnight train out of New Haven's Union Station, snored my way to D.C., and now was heading up to the 4th Street security checkpoint; that's where the Leftists had gathered, the ANSWER jackals and assorted other anti-Inauguralissimos.
The bum was laid out on a big square of cardboard placed over one of those ubiquitous steam grates in D.C. and was wrapped in plastic sheeting. I stopped and crunched across the snow toward him as the masses moved past, oblivious. "Spare change, spare change," he wheezed, toothless, black, pathetic. I approached him and saw that he had The Fear in his eyes; that mistrustful schizoid look common to the homeless, like I might kick him, and also noticed that the inside of his plastic sheet was soaking-wet from the condensation. I imagined just how uncomfortable he must have been, wondered if it even registered with him, damp and lying in a dirt garden.
I had 30 cents in my pocket and fished it out. "I'll go yell at George Bush for you," I told him. "Huh?" I repeated the line. "Huh?" Repeated again. "Huh?" I got right up to him, repeated--and he laughed, he was suddenly human and engaged, the shock of the human, the real. "Oh, thank you, thank you, mister."
As it turned out, I did not yell at George Bush. George Bush was in a limousine. George Bush could not have cared less even if I had been able to yell at him. George Bush was happy enough to ramble on about tyranny and freedom and working together, happy enough to give lip service to bipartisanship, unity and the rest of it, while the assorted reactionaries of the Left turned their backs on him in a symbolic manner, or assailed him with Sieg Heils, all for the benefit of the Italian media.
It's no wonder we're staring down the barrel of another long national nightmare.
Heading back toward the parade zone now, and the Metro Police baton brigades were deploying. Everywhere there was steam rising from those grates, and the imagination swooned--in Iraq the smoke is from exploding IEDs and car bombs; in D.C., it's steam and mirrors. Washington in wartime, buzzing with brawn and mettle, the fortresslike capital city; overextended abroad, it must compensate at home with a show of force worthy of the 1812 invaders. The steam provided a sense of amusement-park war--the simulated hall of horrors, the poignant reminder that We Might Be Next (Again).
So, yes, the security in D.C. was tight. It wasn't fascistic, however, despite what your screaming-mimi Leftoids might have told you. I went through Secret Service and Transportation Security Agency checkpoints twice; the first go-through was up near the endpoint of the parade, near the White House. Here, if you didn't have a ticket, you were allowed to stand along the parade route, but not here, and not there either. Or there. So where can you stand? Apparently, nowhere. Oh.
That did piss me off a bit--despite what the Leftists said, Bush is, in fact, your president, whether you like it or not, and you should have the right to go and holler at him if you so choose. If you so chose, I'd heard you could pay the Secret Service $15 and they'd hook you up with a bleacher seat, but that seemed like just another paranoid tidbit of horseshit peddled by the same people who thought Bush was behind 9/11.
Before I entered that Escherian hellhole of smiling bureaucratic runarounds, I submitted to the first of two searches of the day. There was a frisk, you had to empty your pockets, they confiscated my oranges and pears but let me go through with my little pocket knife, which isn't nearly as weird or stupid as it sounds. You can throw an orange at a limo. The knife--you couldn't do much with it, except try and slash Bush's tires.
And just for the record, the joint I'd stashed deep in a coat pocket, to be smoked at some certain moment deep in the Frenzied Inaugural Moment, made it through twice.
I'd arrived in D.C. at 7 that morning, with plans to try to find my friend Chris, who serves in the presidential detail of the 4th Infantry Division, the "Old Guard" that is responsible for honor-guard duty at Arlington and other ceremonial and security functions around the city. He is the commander of the company that would immediately precede Bush's motorcade, and had told me to look out for the unit dressed in colonial military uniforms; he'd be at the head of that group.
You got a problem with colonialists?
I don't.
I like a good parade, even if I don't particularly like this president.
I knew that some local antiwar types were planning, along with "thousands" of others, to turn their backs on Bush when his motorcade came by. I was not going to do that; I was reminded again of something Dr. Gonzo once said, that you can turn your back on a friend, but don't turn your back on a drug.
Chris is my friend and I wasn't doing any such thing as turning my back on him. Bush is the drug--addictive, tempting, soothing, he's an Executive-grade eightball who'll fill your mind with glorious visions of Imperial Wowzaa if you let him. Turn your back at your own peril--I choose the staredown method.
I headed out of D.C.'s Union Station after a coffee and checked out the scene around Capitol Hill. A huge cordoned-off area, that's what I discovered, with four degrees of access, each color-coded in the manner of a terror alert.
It struck many as overkill, a pointed reminder of the emergence of American fascism, but why should anyone be surprised about the meticulous security measures? Especially considering that the protesters, with God and chads on their side, basically shut down the inaugural parade back in 2001.
I started to walk down toward the Potomac, skirting the edge of the Mall, and as I went along, an overwhelming need to take a leak manifested itself. I could see rows and rows of portable johns inside the secure zone, but since the rest of the city was more or less closed down, I couldn't find anywhere to pee.
I mean, I almost pissed my pants. This was a problem, compounded by the hordes of teenage Bushites that were now making their way to Capitol Hill. Everywhere, there were idling buses unpacking groups of these Hideous Children of Bush (as a Hideous Child of Reagan, I'm entitled to the scorn).
I made a point of holding my ground along the sidewalks and took great pleasure in slamming into a few of these teenage Bush leaguers--the shock of recognition that makes the world go 'round?--though the subsequent jarring of my bladder made this a short-lived tactic of my personal Violent Counter-Revolutionary Moment. I finally made it down to the Potomac and bopped into a riverfront hotel, used the facilities there and then sat down for a morning tuneup along the river.
It's always fun to get stoned in situations like these, and man, I got as fucking high as an NSA satellite after I smoked the wakeup joint, started babbling into my tape machine as I reclined on the docks, checking out the boats and the mud-brown water, absorbing whatever slight hits of sunshine I might on this raw Inaugural morning:
"At the corner of Water and 7th you finally find refuge in this windy, bleak, freaked-out, pimpled fucked-up town. Avoiding the buses becomes the objective, avoiding the squads of Midwest teenage humps come all the way across country to raise their fist for big George W., their pop-star president."
I went on:
"The black limo crawls up the exit ramp along the grassy knoll, along 9th Street. Down by the Potomac River, George Bush don't truck nothin' with me, motherfucker. You crowds, you walk to your Bush. You find your Bush. You die in your Bush. Your Bush is Doom. Your Bush is Death. Your Bush is Disgrace."
Hey, that's pretty good....
A few hours later and I'd just gone through security checkpoint II, this one manned by a group of Secret Service agents. I gave the young and friendly fellow my camera bag, he went through it, and found this little aluminum-foil package.
"That's my toothbrush."
"Is that all that's wrapped up in there?"
"My toothpaste."
"You're a smart man."
"I travel light."
He frisked me and paused at the doob-zone. The doob was stashed in one of those floating keychains you use for your boat keys. It was under my wallet. He squeezed, fondled, and finally said, "Enjoy the parade."
My feet were freezing, and the yellow-toothed woman with the sign that misspelled the name of Abu Ghraib torturer Charles Graner was making me want to jump off my parade perch and punch her in the throat. Every time a GOPerson would make the error of shooting the Leftie phalanx, there she was, up in their ear, hectoring. The woman with the fur coat--murderer!
Poor people everywhere, and you wear fur! American political discourse has largely devolved to the nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah level--I blame Newt Gingrich; who do you blame?--and so this wasn't surprising, but it was deeply annoying, this awful, Guatemalan-duds-bedecked embarrassment of the Left. I felt bad for fur lady, I really did. Fur's not the problem, especially when it's below freezing. There's poor people everywhere, so why don't you go home, Yellowtooth, and volunteer at a soup kitchen? Your presence here is entirely self-serving.
I was standing near the front of the parade with all the Lefties, and my feet were beginning to feel rather numb. The boo-buzz had long-worn off, but I'd have been crazy to whip out the Secret Service spliff--the furtive poke along the fringes, yes, but open puffing among the masses, no. I lived long enough in New York City to learn that rule.
Along with the rest of the crowd, I waited, and waited, for the parade to begin. (It was delayed by almost an hour.) All around me, the scruffy and alienated Left did its bit. At one point, an elderly gentleman stood next to me and tried to strike up a conversation; I talked with him for a few moments and then went back to stewing about how fucking cold and shitty the weather was, and how totally inept, inert, irritating and ineffective this Left had become.
Every so often, a line of limos and cop cars would whiz by, and were greeted with more Sieg Heils than you'll find in a Leni Riefenstahl movie. Even Bill Clinton got the Heil Hitler salute. The old codger standing next to me at one point did a furtive little Sieg Heil, like he was some dirty little boy doing something that would make teacher mad, and capped it off with a giggle that made me want to grab his Medicare card and burn it in front of him.
Sieg Heils are no way for the Left to reclaim the moral, let alone the political, high ground. The cops aren't Nazis and Bush isn't Worse Than Hitler. He's worse than a lot of things, but Hitler is not one of them. If this were, in fact, Nazi America, the ANSWER people would've been sent to forced-labor camps in Nevada. As it was, this was the first inauguration in history where the moiling opposition was given its own temporary autonomous zone, right near the front of the parade, complete with a speakers' platform and viewing stand.
So stick your Sieg Heils up your ass, people, and get serious.
Earlier in the day, I'd run into the lovable whackballs of the "God Hates Fags" brigades, with their shocking (and, to me at least, darkly hilarious) signs reading Thank God For Sept. 11 and such. That's about as far right as you can get in this country these days without going and actually blowing up the Murrah Building. The Leftie Sieg Heilers were, to the average Republican, as repugnant as these genuine homebrewed fascists are--and that is bad news for the Left, despite what the Italian media might have said about it (the Italian media loved the protesters).
I did not. Keep your Native American hagiography and fanatical multiculturalism to yourself from here on in, okay? Ease off on the fizzbomb analyses of evil "globalization" and recognize that capitalism isn't going anywhere anytime soon. As they say in AA--deal with life on life's terms, not Marx's.
I want the old-timey, bare-knuckled, aggressively macho Left that doesn't call it a "guilty pleasure" when they watch trayf television or find themselves thinking that maybe executing serial rapists of 7-year-olds isn't quite such a bad idea, after all.
My left is the acerbic left, the porn-loving left, the Lenny Bruce left, the left that gladly offers observations about other-colored people without fear or concern about being called a racist. The Left that thinks Michael Moore is a Big Fat Idiot but grudgingly respects his movies. That thinks Jewish activists who make bad-taste complaints about the Advocate putting a Star of David on a Chinese-food container are humorless. (See the letters page this week.) That thinks people who say you are either part of the problem or part of the solution--are part of the problem. That actually respects Colin Powell, despite his shilling for Bush before the U.N. in the Iraq war leadup.
Foolish me, I'd thought I might find some of my scabrous and patriotic fellow travelers in Washington. Instead it was a ho-hum assemblage of the usual suspects, united in what must now be called a Hatred of America--since the opposition was not just to Bush, but to the whole Inaugural spectacle; itself an objectively wonderful and balls-out celebration of the true greatness that lies at the heart of this country. It struck me, as a fist might strike a septum, causing death, that the Left simply cannot handle displays of military might, or power and privilege generally, since it has written itself out of all of it through its incessant pandering to whiny interest groups, groups filled with repressed-memory syndromes and chronic fatigue, who cannot help but vaingloriously think that The Man is coming after them next. Join Al Qaeda and then we'll talk. Until then, enjoy your Volvo and your NPR and, sure, ladies, openly fantasize about what Barack Obama might be like in the sack.
This is not the Left I signed up with back in the 1980s. Nor is it the Left I'd like to associate with anymore. I've had it with this Left, and not just because I'm no longer a knee-jerking 23-year old looking to score Hot Leftist Pussy at the Protest. It's because they are wrong--tactically, strategically, politically, spiritually.
The Left that showed up in D.C. is the jackbooted-thugs-maaaaan Left, the feral-cat Left, cornered and too scruffy, humorless and way-too-convinced of their own righteousness--and I'm not just talking about the shameful war.
The Left needs a "fourth way," and the contours of such a Left ought to begin with the proposition that if you're going to get your hands dirty, you ought to first take a shower. Burn your Rage Against the Machine albums while you're at it, and leave Larry Summers alone. Also: Eliminate the expression "people of color" from your vocabulary. The Left we ought to have subscribes to the Weekly Standard because it's an interesting and compelling read, and because it understands the fullness and reach of the term "liberal." This Left is American to the core, invests in the stock market, hangs an American flag from its window without a hint of contemptuous irony. It burns its copy of The Collected Works of Katha Pollitt . It's self-assured about its righteousness without being smug. It doesn't equate the police with Nazi stormtroopers, and it understands that Bush, too, shall pass, and the Republic will outlive him. In other words, this Left has not completely lost faith in the resiliency of this fine country of ours.
Hey, it's our America, too, and it's about time the Left started reclaiming it--proudly, patriotically, without apology, and without stooping to tactics that do nothing but give those red-staters good reason to continue thinking we're nothing but a bunch of filthy, ill-informed America-haters.
THE BITTER END OF THE LEFT: Scenes from a wartime inauguration. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:97675)
by Tom Gogola - January 27, 2005
Washington, Jan. 20--The bum was sprawled out in front of the EPA building and I was thinking about a line from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, when Dr. Gonzo is watching a skel from his hotel window and trying hard not to identify too much with him. I'd rolled down to Washington the night before on the midnight train out of New Haven's Union Station, snored my way to D.C., and now was heading up to the 4th Street security checkpoint; that's where the Leftists had gathered, the ANSWER jackals and assorted other anti-Inauguralissimos.
The bum was laid out on a big square of cardboard placed over one of those ubiquitous steam grates in D.C. and was wrapped in plastic sheeting. I stopped and crunched across the snow toward him as the masses moved past, oblivious. "Spare change, spare change," he wheezed, toothless, black, pathetic. I approached him and saw that he had The Fear in his eyes; that mistrustful schizoid look common to the homeless, like I might kick him, and also noticed that the inside of his plastic sheet was soaking-wet from the condensation. I imagined just how uncomfortable he must have been, wondered if it even registered with him, damp and lying in a dirt garden.
I had 30 cents in my pocket and fished it out. "I'll go yell at George Bush for you," I told him. "Huh?" I repeated the line. "Huh?" Repeated again. "Huh?" I got right up to him, repeated--and he laughed, he was suddenly human and engaged, the shock of the human, the real. "Oh, thank you, thank you, mister."
As it turned out, I did not yell at George Bush. George Bush was in a limousine. George Bush could not have cared less even if I had been able to yell at him. George Bush was happy enough to ramble on about tyranny and freedom and working together, happy enough to give lip service to bipartisanship, unity and the rest of it, while the assorted reactionaries of the Left turned their backs on him in a symbolic manner, or assailed him with Sieg Heils, all for the benefit of the Italian media.
It's no wonder we're staring down the barrel of another long national nightmare.
Heading back toward the parade zone now, and the Metro Police baton brigades were deploying. Everywhere there was steam rising from those grates, and the imagination swooned--in Iraq the smoke is from exploding IEDs and car bombs; in D.C., it's steam and mirrors. Washington in wartime, buzzing with brawn and mettle, the fortresslike capital city; overextended abroad, it must compensate at home with a show of force worthy of the 1812 invaders. The steam provided a sense of amusement-park war--the simulated hall of horrors, the poignant reminder that We Might Be Next (Again).
So, yes, the security in D.C. was tight. It wasn't fascistic, however, despite what your screaming-mimi Leftoids might have told you. I went through Secret Service and Transportation Security Agency checkpoints twice; the first go-through was up near the endpoint of the parade, near the White House. Here, if you didn't have a ticket, you were allowed to stand along the parade route, but not here, and not there either. Or there. So where can you stand? Apparently, nowhere. Oh.
That did piss me off a bit--despite what the Leftists said, Bush is, in fact, your president, whether you like it or not, and you should have the right to go and holler at him if you so choose. If you so chose, I'd heard you could pay the Secret Service $15 and they'd hook you up with a bleacher seat, but that seemed like just another paranoid tidbit of horseshit peddled by the same people who thought Bush was behind 9/11.
Before I entered that Escherian hellhole of smiling bureaucratic runarounds, I submitted to the first of two searches of the day. There was a frisk, you had to empty your pockets, they confiscated my oranges and pears but let me go through with my little pocket knife, which isn't nearly as weird or stupid as it sounds. You can throw an orange at a limo. The knife--you couldn't do much with it, except try and slash Bush's tires.
And just for the record, the joint I'd stashed deep in a coat pocket, to be smoked at some certain moment deep in the Frenzied Inaugural Moment, made it through twice.
I'd arrived in D.C. at 7 that morning, with plans to try to find my friend Chris, who serves in the presidential detail of the 4th Infantry Division, the "Old Guard" that is responsible for honor-guard duty at Arlington and other ceremonial and security functions around the city. He is the commander of the company that would immediately precede Bush's motorcade, and had told me to look out for the unit dressed in colonial military uniforms; he'd be at the head of that group.
You got a problem with colonialists?
I don't.
I like a good parade, even if I don't particularly like this president.
I knew that some local antiwar types were planning, along with "thousands" of others, to turn their backs on Bush when his motorcade came by. I was not going to do that; I was reminded again of something Dr. Gonzo once said, that you can turn your back on a friend, but don't turn your back on a drug.
Chris is my friend and I wasn't doing any such thing as turning my back on him. Bush is the drug--addictive, tempting, soothing, he's an Executive-grade eightball who'll fill your mind with glorious visions of Imperial Wowzaa if you let him. Turn your back at your own peril--I choose the staredown method.
I headed out of D.C.'s Union Station after a coffee and checked out the scene around Capitol Hill. A huge cordoned-off area, that's what I discovered, with four degrees of access, each color-coded in the manner of a terror alert.
It struck many as overkill, a pointed reminder of the emergence of American fascism, but why should anyone be surprised about the meticulous security measures? Especially considering that the protesters, with God and chads on their side, basically shut down the inaugural parade back in 2001.
I started to walk down toward the Potomac, skirting the edge of the Mall, and as I went along, an overwhelming need to take a leak manifested itself. I could see rows and rows of portable johns inside the secure zone, but since the rest of the city was more or less closed down, I couldn't find anywhere to pee.
I mean, I almost pissed my pants. This was a problem, compounded by the hordes of teenage Bushites that were now making their way to Capitol Hill. Everywhere, there were idling buses unpacking groups of these Hideous Children of Bush (as a Hideous Child of Reagan, I'm entitled to the scorn).
I made a point of holding my ground along the sidewalks and took great pleasure in slamming into a few of these teenage Bush leaguers--the shock of recognition that makes the world go 'round?--though the subsequent jarring of my bladder made this a short-lived tactic of my personal Violent Counter-Revolutionary Moment. I finally made it down to the Potomac and bopped into a riverfront hotel, used the facilities there and then sat down for a morning tuneup along the river.
It's always fun to get stoned in situations like these, and man, I got as fucking high as an NSA satellite after I smoked the wakeup joint, started babbling into my tape machine as I reclined on the docks, checking out the boats and the mud-brown water, absorbing whatever slight hits of sunshine I might on this raw Inaugural morning:
"At the corner of Water and 7th you finally find refuge in this windy, bleak, freaked-out, pimpled fucked-up town. Avoiding the buses becomes the objective, avoiding the squads of Midwest teenage humps come all the way across country to raise their fist for big George W., their pop-star president."
I went on:
"The black limo crawls up the exit ramp along the grassy knoll, along 9th Street. Down by the Potomac River, George Bush don't truck nothin' with me, motherfucker. You crowds, you walk to your Bush. You find your Bush. You die in your Bush. Your Bush is Doom. Your Bush is Death. Your Bush is Disgrace."
Hey, that's pretty good....
A few hours later and I'd just gone through security checkpoint II, this one manned by a group of Secret Service agents. I gave the young and friendly fellow my camera bag, he went through it, and found this little aluminum-foil package.
"That's my toothbrush."
"Is that all that's wrapped up in there?"
"My toothpaste."
"You're a smart man."
"I travel light."
He frisked me and paused at the doob-zone. The doob was stashed in one of those floating keychains you use for your boat keys. It was under my wallet. He squeezed, fondled, and finally said, "Enjoy the parade."
My feet were freezing, and the yellow-toothed woman with the sign that misspelled the name of Abu Ghraib torturer Charles Graner was making me want to jump off my parade perch and punch her in the throat. Every time a GOPerson would make the error of shooting the Leftie phalanx, there she was, up in their ear, hectoring. The woman with the fur coat--murderer!
Poor people everywhere, and you wear fur! American political discourse has largely devolved to the nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah level--I blame Newt Gingrich; who do you blame?--and so this wasn't surprising, but it was deeply annoying, this awful, Guatemalan-duds-bedecked embarrassment of the Left. I felt bad for fur lady, I really did. Fur's not the problem, especially when it's below freezing. There's poor people everywhere, so why don't you go home, Yellowtooth, and volunteer at a soup kitchen? Your presence here is entirely self-serving.
I was standing near the front of the parade with all the Lefties, and my feet were beginning to feel rather numb. The boo-buzz had long-worn off, but I'd have been crazy to whip out the Secret Service spliff--the furtive poke along the fringes, yes, but open puffing among the masses, no. I lived long enough in New York City to learn that rule.
Along with the rest of the crowd, I waited, and waited, for the parade to begin. (It was delayed by almost an hour.) All around me, the scruffy and alienated Left did its bit. At one point, an elderly gentleman stood next to me and tried to strike up a conversation; I talked with him for a few moments and then went back to stewing about how fucking cold and shitty the weather was, and how totally inept, inert, irritating and ineffective this Left had become.
Every so often, a line of limos and cop cars would whiz by, and were greeted with more Sieg Heils than you'll find in a Leni Riefenstahl movie. Even Bill Clinton got the Heil Hitler salute. The old codger standing next to me at one point did a furtive little Sieg Heil, like he was some dirty little boy doing something that would make teacher mad, and capped it off with a giggle that made me want to grab his Medicare card and burn it in front of him.
Sieg Heils are no way for the Left to reclaim the moral, let alone the political, high ground. The cops aren't Nazis and Bush isn't Worse Than Hitler. He's worse than a lot of things, but Hitler is not one of them. If this were, in fact, Nazi America, the ANSWER people would've been sent to forced-labor camps in Nevada. As it was, this was the first inauguration in history where the moiling opposition was given its own temporary autonomous zone, right near the front of the parade, complete with a speakers' platform and viewing stand.
So stick your Sieg Heils up your ass, people, and get serious.
Earlier in the day, I'd run into the lovable whackballs of the "God Hates Fags" brigades, with their shocking (and, to me at least, darkly hilarious) signs reading Thank God For Sept. 11 and such. That's about as far right as you can get in this country these days without going and actually blowing up the Murrah Building. The Leftie Sieg Heilers were, to the average Republican, as repugnant as these genuine homebrewed fascists are--and that is bad news for the Left, despite what the Italian media might have said about it (the Italian media loved the protesters).
I did not. Keep your Native American hagiography and fanatical multiculturalism to yourself from here on in, okay? Ease off on the fizzbomb analyses of evil "globalization" and recognize that capitalism isn't going anywhere anytime soon. As they say in AA--deal with life on life's terms, not Marx's.
I want the old-timey, bare-knuckled, aggressively macho Left that doesn't call it a "guilty pleasure" when they watch trayf television or find themselves thinking that maybe executing serial rapists of 7-year-olds isn't quite such a bad idea, after all.
My left is the acerbic left, the porn-loving left, the Lenny Bruce left, the left that gladly offers observations about other-colored people without fear or concern about being called a racist. The Left that thinks Michael Moore is a Big Fat Idiot but grudgingly respects his movies. That thinks Jewish activists who make bad-taste complaints about the Advocate putting a Star of David on a Chinese-food container are humorless. (See the letters page this week.) That thinks people who say you are either part of the problem or part of the solution--are part of the problem. That actually respects Colin Powell, despite his shilling for Bush before the U.N. in the Iraq war leadup.
Foolish me, I'd thought I might find some of my scabrous and patriotic fellow travelers in Washington. Instead it was a ho-hum assemblage of the usual suspects, united in what must now be called a Hatred of America--since the opposition was not just to Bush, but to the whole Inaugural spectacle; itself an objectively wonderful and balls-out celebration of the true greatness that lies at the heart of this country. It struck me, as a fist might strike a septum, causing death, that the Left simply cannot handle displays of military might, or power and privilege generally, since it has written itself out of all of it through its incessant pandering to whiny interest groups, groups filled with repressed-memory syndromes and chronic fatigue, who cannot help but vaingloriously think that The Man is coming after them next. Join Al Qaeda and then we'll talk. Until then, enjoy your Volvo and your NPR and, sure, ladies, openly fantasize about what Barack Obama might be like in the sack.
This is not the Left I signed up with back in the 1980s. Nor is it the Left I'd like to associate with anymore. I've had it with this Left, and not just because I'm no longer a knee-jerking 23-year old looking to score Hot Leftist Pussy at the Protest. It's because they are wrong--tactically, strategically, politically, spiritually.
The Left that showed up in D.C. is the jackbooted-thugs-maaaaan Left, the feral-cat Left, cornered and too scruffy, humorless and way-too-convinced of their own righteousness--and I'm not just talking about the shameful war.
The Left needs a "fourth way," and the contours of such a Left ought to begin with the proposition that if you're going to get your hands dirty, you ought to first take a shower. Burn your Rage Against the Machine albums while you're at it, and leave Larry Summers alone. Also: Eliminate the expression "people of color" from your vocabulary. The Left we ought to have subscribes to the Weekly Standard because it's an interesting and compelling read, and because it understands the fullness and reach of the term "liberal." This Left is American to the core, invests in the stock market, hangs an American flag from its window without a hint of contemptuous irony. It burns its copy of The Collected Works of Katha Pollitt . It's self-assured about its righteousness without being smug. It doesn't equate the police with Nazi stormtroopers, and it understands that Bush, too, shall pass, and the Republic will outlive him. In other words, this Left has not completely lost faith in the resiliency of this fine country of ours.
Hey, it's our America, too, and it's about time the Left started reclaiming it--proudly, patriotically, without apology, and without stooping to tactics that do nothing but give those red-staters good reason to continue thinking we're nothing but a bunch of filthy, ill-informed America-haters.